Taking AppSec to 11: AppSec Pipeline, DevOps and Making Things Better

Slide deck from AppSec California 2016 + some additional slides.
Abstract:
How many applications are in your company’s portfolio? What’s the headcount for your AppSec team? Whatever your situation is, I am sure the numbers are not in your favor. Its not time to find a new career, it's time to up your game. This talk will cover how to take your small merry band of AppSec professionals and scale it up to a virtual army. By taking the best of DevOps, Agile and CI/CD, you can iteratively up your AppSec game over time and begin your ascent out of the security hole you are in.

The talk covers real world experiences running AppSec groups at two different companies. Rackspace with approximately 4,000+ employees and Pearson with 40,000+. Both have an international presence and far more apps and developers that AppSec staff. The talk covers the key principles to speed and scale up AppSec programs using an AppSec Pipeline as well as practical examples of these practices put into use. Start early and begin to buy down the technical security dept which feels inevitable with more traditional AppSec program thinking.

9.
Key Features of
AppSec Pipelines
◇ Designed for iterative improvement
◇ Provides a reusable path for AppSec activities to
follow
◇ Provides a consistent process for both the team and
our constituency
◇ One way flow with well-defined states
◇ Relies heavily on automation
◇ Grow in functionality organically over time
◇ Gracefully interconnects with the development
process

16.
Pipeline - Testing
◇ Results from your CI/CD could flow into Threadfix from
build Pipeline
◇ Gauntlt runs results could also flow into the AppSec
Pipeline
◇ Choose the tools that make sense for you organization

18.
◇ Allow us to have visibility into WIP
◇ Better understand/track/optimize flow of
engagements
◇ Average static test takes ...
◇ Great increase in consistency
◇ Easier re-allocation of engagements between staff
◇ Each step has a well defined interface
◇ Knowing who has what allows for more informed
“cost of switching” conversations
◇ Flexible enough for a range of skills and
app maturity
Why we like AppSec
Pipelines

19.
~5x increase
2014
44 assessments
2015
~200 assessments
Changes from 2014 to 2015:
- Created the AppSec Pipeline - initial launch in March 2015
- AppSec team numbers dropped - lost a couple of key people approx 3.5 FTEs
- Two of the AppSec team members went meta for most of 2015

25.
Defect Dojo
◇ DefectDojo is a tool created by the Security
Engineering team at Rackspace to track testing
efforts.
◇ Streamlines the testing process by offering features
such as templating, report generation, metrics, and
baseline self-service tools.
◇ Though it was designed with security folks in mind,
there is nothing keeping QA/QE testers, or any other
testers for that matter, from using it productively.
◇ https://github.com/rackerlabs/django-DefectDojo

37.
Key Take Aways
◇ Automate, automate, automate
￭ Look for “paper cuts” and fix those first
◇ Finding workflow – your AppSec Pipeline
￭ Figure this out and standardize / optimize
◇ Create systems which can grow organically
￭ App is never done, it’s just created to easily be
added to over time
￭ e.g. Finding blocks become templates for next
report
◇ Learn to talk “dev”

41.
Gauntlt
◇ Open source, MIT License
◇ Gauntlt comes with pre-canned steps that hook
security testing tools
◇ Gauntlt does not install tools
◇ Gauntlt wants to be part of the CI/CD pipeline
◇ Be a good citizen of exit status and stdout/stderr

43.
Defect Dojo
◇ DefectDojo is a tool created by the Security
Engineering team at Rackspace to track testing
efforts.
◇ Streamlines the testing process by offering features
such as templating, report generation, metrics, and
baseline self-service tools.
◇ Though it was designed with security folks in mind,
there is nothing keeping QA/QE testers, or any other
testers for that matter, from using it productively.
◇ https://github.com/rackerlabs/django-DefectDojo

45.
Findings directly to
bug trackers
◇ PDFs are great, bugs are better
◇ Security issues are now part of the normal work flow
◇ ThreadFix is nice for pumping issues into defect
trackers - http://code.google.com/p/threadfix/

46.
For the reticent: nag,
nag, nag
◇ Attach a SLA to each severity level for findings
◇ Walk up the Org chart as things get older
◇ Bonus points for dashboards and defect tracker APIs
◇ Get management sold first

47.
Agent – one mole to
rule them all
◇ Add an agent to the standard deploy
◇ Add a dashboard to visualize state of infrastructure
◇ Roll your own or find a vendor
Mozilla MIG

48.
Turn Vuln Scanning on
its Head
◇ Add value for your Ops teams
◇ Roll your own or find a vendor
◇ Reverse the scan then report standard

51.
#1 Workflow
Each Step Repeatable
◇ Remove all haphazard and ad hoc work from the
process
◇ Scripting languages are your friends
◇ Config Mgmt – Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible, CFEngine
◇ Make sure what you do can be done on 1 server or
10,000 servers

52.
#1 Workflow
Never Pass on Defects
◇ Test early and often
◇ Increase the rigor of testing as you work left to right
◇ When a failure occurs end that flow and start a new
one after corrections
◇ The further right you are, the more expensive failure is
so concentrate your early work on left side (intake)
◇ In AppSec, defects are false positives

53.
#1 Workflow
Local optimizations with a global view
◇ Ensure no single-step optimizations degrade the
overall performance of the workflow
◇ Find the bottleneck in your workflow and start there
￭ Upstream changes will just back things up
￭ Downstream changes won't manifest since input
is limited
◇ Each new optimization creates a new bottleneck
￭ Iterate on this!

54.
“
Spending time
optimizing anything
other than the critical
resource is an illusion.

59.
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